A two person show of photography, collage and mixed media work by a mother and daughter, each exploring in her own way the transformation of something old into something new through art – Rosalind Bloom andSarah R. Bloom. April 1 – 30, 2015. Artist Reception Saturday, April 11, 4:00 – 7:00pm at Da Vinci Art Alliance, 704 Catharine St, Philadelphia, PA 19147
Gallery hours Saturday & Sunday. 12:00 – 6:00pm, Wednesday 6:00 – 8:00, and by appointment. Gallery will be closed Easter Sunday, April 5th. Phone contact 610-715-1348 or 610-420-1733
“The past is reclaimed for the present. Ephemera of times gone by are retrieved and then transformed by our thoughts, experiences, current perspective, and the creative process into something new and different. Bits and pieces carved out of earlier work spark something new. Art is about transformation; something that existed one way is reclaimed and becomes something else.” – Rosalind Bloom, April, 2015
“I am seeking to adapt to my changing body, mindset and circumstance as I age. I see myself as an extension of these abandoned spaces, using them as an echo of the push/pull of our identity as we age. There is light and dark, sadness and beauty, fear and acceptance, a folding into and a pushing out all at once. I am working towards reclaiming my place in the world and redefining my mid-life as one of transformation rather than crisis.” – Sarah R. Bloom, April, 2015
“The Da Vinci Art Alliance was founded in 1931 and enjoys a distinguished history in Philadelphia. It was formed to serve the needs of artists and artisans and to promote the edification and appreciation of the arts. Our well-located building across from Fleisher Art Memorail was purchased in 1959 to provide studio, and gallery spaces for its members and outreach for the community. Da Vinci Art Alliance maintains a small collection of works by noted founders. The Da Vinci Art Alliance supports community based arts programs, and cultural and educational exchanges through monthly exhibitions, lectures and events.” – Da Vinci Art Alliance
Philadelphia/TriState Artists Equity 66th Anniversary Members Juried Exhibition at The Art Gallery at Franklin Commons, April 19 to May 21, 2015
Philadelphia/TriState Artists Equity invites you to its 66th Anniversary Members Juried ExhibitionApril 19 to May 21, 2015 at The Art Gallery at Franklin Commons! The Opening Reception will be held on April 19, 2- 4 PM. Free and open to the public. The exhibit will be juried by Marsha Moss, Public Curator and Consultant.
Philadelphia/TriState Artists Equity66th Anniversary Members Juried Exhibition at The Art Gallery at Franklin Commons, April 19 to May 21, 2015
“Franklin Commons is an old (approximately 100 years) industrial building that has had only four owners and four uses. It was initially a silk mill, then a carpet mill, and in the mid-70’s it was purchased by Budd Company which moved here from Bridgeport. They made plastic pump parts for sewage treatment plants. In the mid-90’s, a division of the Budd Company purchased the building, made the same product, with the same employees. They ceased operations in approximately 2003. Palma, L.P. bought the building on March 17, 2006.
After the environmental remediation, it was divided into leasehold spaces and leasing commenced in 2007. At the present time, approximately one-half of the tenants are educational or quasi-educational and one-half are not. Check out the link below for an inside look at the progress and exciting transformation of the Franklin Commons.
Philadelphia/TriState Artists Equity66th Anniversary Members Juried Exhibition at The Art Gallery at Franklin Commons, April 19 to May 21, 2015
Artists Equity is an association for professional fine artists.
• Exhibition and networking opportunities for all levels of the profession and in all fine arts media
• Upper tier venues, Select Exhibitions
• Professional development programs, Mentoring, Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing
• Best practices and policies on entrance fees, art in the fundraising setting, contracts and negotiating
Historically, Artists Equity championed improved economic and working conditions for artists, as well as the protection and expansion of artists’ rights. Our accomplishments include the successful establishment of a 1% for art ordinance in Philadelphia (the first of its kind in the country), the organization of a Symposium for Health Hazards in the Visual Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the sponsorship of many celebrations of the visual arts throughout the regionDelaware Valley.” – Philadelphia / Tri-State Artists Equity
Stoney Lamar makes beautiful sculptures out of wood and his work is traveling the country in a show called A Sense of Balance. His work can be seen at Philadelphia’s Center for Art in Wood and the Synderman – Works Galleries through April 18, 2015. He talks about his life and career and how Parkinson’s Disease is affecting his work. – John Thornton
“What is true is that no matter how striking, unique and evolutionary Stoney Lamar’s career has been, he arrived at its beginning some decades ago by an entirely different path. He learned his geometrical theory in a pool hall; he aggravated his minister-father; he grappled with a war; he set out in a career direction that he neither liked nor decided he was much good at; he almost by accident discovered what he was good at, at long last feeling the call in his hands and soul.” – excerpt artist statement Stoney Lamar
“William Stoney Lamar (b. 1951) has contributed exceptional skill and vision to the world of wood turning for over 25 years. Stoney Lamar’s sculpture is created primarily through a unique approach to multi-axial lathe work, giving his pieces a distinct sense of line and movement unlike other works of turned wood. He lets the shape, color and modeling of the wood determine a piece’s finished appearance and employs paint and metal in his forms. Stoney Lamar is a founder of the American Association of Woodturners, teaches and lectures, and has served on the boards of the American Craft Council, The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, and of the Southern Highland Craft Guild. The Center for Art in Wood is proud to present this retrospective, the final venue on the national tour, in our Gerry Lenfest Gallery.” – Center for Art in Woodwebsite
“Stoney Lamar: Standing Forms. On view from March 6, 2015 to April 18, 2015. This exhibit is in conjunction with A Sense of Balance: The Sculpture of Stoney Lamar, a solo exhibit traveling throughout the US, which will open at the Center for Art in Wood in mid-February.
Saturday, March 7, 2015 | 2:00 – 4:00 | Tour of Stoney Lomar: Standing Forms at Synderman – Works Galleries, followed by a gallery talk, tour of A Sense of Balance: The Sculpture of Stoney Lamar, and reception at The Center for Art in Wood with Stoney Lamar, Curator Andrew Glasgow, and studio artist and writer Bruce Metcalf. The Center for Art in Wood is located across the street from Synderman – Works Galleries at 141 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA.” – Synderman – Works Galleries
(i)The steps to this particular abstraction… are, like the ascent to any of the abstractions that interest us importantly, an ascent through illusion which gathers round us more closely and thickly, as we might expect it to do, the more we penetrate it. – Wallace Stevens
Metaphor moves in a flare of intuition that is both the recognition of an abstract likeness and the event of a poetic transformation. Arrested, I see: this is that, although it is not. A metaphor is an impossible being, an alchemy of logic and magic, a dun-white horse who – pausing, turning, breathing – returns one’s regard from the verge of a deep dark wood. As in metaphor, similitude is estranged and remade in the tropical grove we enter with Eileen Neff – sometimes in a pitch-dark night, sometimes in the lambent green light of day.
In January 2014, Eileen Neff held a three-week artist’s residency at Monte Azul, a unique amalgamation of contemporary art center, eco-resort, and nature preserve set in the rainforest of southern Costa Rica. While not documentary in any usual sense of the word, the works that comprise Traveling Into View are drawn from her experiences of the residency – experiences of transit and arrival, of the forest’s fecundity and her own limitations in face of such fecundity, of close looking amid profuse stimulus, and of repeated passages (as by foot between her casita and Monte Azul’s café, or by car over the mountain road linking the compound to parts beyond). The photographs Neff made in Costa Rica became the raw material for the digitally-crafted pictures that take on physical forms and spatial relationships in the gallery – all of which has as much to do with painting, sculpture, and literature as it does with the insular traditions of photography. Neff’s constellations of image-objects displace linear coherence with the sensibilities of collage, a mode of expression that draws close to experience while declining to represent causes and effects in a prosaic manner.
As Neff’s work often has, the current project posits a kind of dream-like photographic narrative and then fractures that narrative over the razor edges of temporality and perception. In its introductory passage the installation suggests the unfolding arrival of a beholder who is both rapt by technologically augmented vision and savvy to it. The god’s-eye vista of Window Seat receives a reflexive jab in Pre-Viewing, in which the shadow of a superimposed postcard rack reveals a picturesque view of Costa Rican landscape as a constructed surface. (ii) A knowing gesture, the postcard rack is also a reference to Neff’s oeuvre, as well as a synecdoche for the larger ecosystem of photographic imagery that preconditions the traveler’s perception and representation of the world. Fast on the heels of this canny dialogue comes Mountain Road, a (roughly) three-and-a-half by five-foot gulp of experience in which earthbound sensory overload seems to overflow cerebral maneuver. As the beholder is sped through unfamiliar, sublime terrain, roadside foliage blurs against landscape, and the relation between figure and ground scintillates.
If there is a suggestion in these works that some type of distance may be necessary for sense-
making, there are complex ripostes throughout the project. Two pendants to Mountain Road embody immediate examples. Evoking, respectively, the parted curtain of enlightenment painting and the beady gaze of the taxonomist, The Golden Leaf and Moon-Tropic broach historical modes of looking and picturing that have served to bring the phenomenal into a visual order. These two pictures seem to promise both a grand spectacle and still, close, concentrated seeing. Scrutiny, however, works both ways. In Moon-Tropic, what appears to be the fronds of a tropical plant in the compass of a botanist’s magnifying glass is in fact a reflection, caught in a mirrored disc Neff brought with her as potential working material, along with the roll of Mylar film she used to create Reflected and Reflected 2 (two chromogenic prints that appear later in the installation). At some point in the artist’s process, the photographed mirror-double of botanical fact was twined with the celestial bodies of the Costa Rican night.
Circuits of resemblance are also much at issue in The Golden Leaf, a photograph (and a title) that describes the form of a curtain tie-back, the appearance of a pictured curtain, and the effect of gold pigment on the surface of a print (as in, gold leaf) – not to mention a parallel realm of reference to tropical flora and the grasping fantasies of explorers-cum-treasure hunters. Here the curtain is drawn back on glinting indices of disappeared phenomena, artifacts of the lens made inscrutable in a conjured night. In Neff’s characteristically precise visual language, these first pictures seem simultaneously to reinforce the allure of vision and qualify its capacity to discern. In a related vein, consider the lightbox transparency, Green Honeycreeper, installed alone in an alcove between the front and rear spaces of the gallery. The work stems from a recurrent experience during Neff’s residency: she passed this tangle of trees and the eponymous bird on the walk between the café and her living quarters – (iii) “a regular, brilliant moment had several times each day.”
There is a sensual universe even within minute proximal encounter, a telescoping intensity for which the gesture of isolation here provides a kind of felt analog. A thatch of vines and branches knits the world together, while sprays of color and the very luminescence of the object seem to pull towards a wilder revelation. The experience of keen looking is both irreducible and rich. So rich, in fact, that its expression tends to undercut and overflow representation’s urge towards structure and distance. In the front space of the gallery, across from Mountain Road, gathers a coterie of pictures (though more than pictures) of leaves and birds. This portion of Neff’s project has been aptly described as “a kind of portrait gallery where each leaf is celebrated for the remarkable individual that it is.”(iv) Personified in stature and represented with a penetrating attention usually reserved for revelations of psychological depth, each leaf seems to harbor an interior life, hinted at by the play of shapes and shadows above or below its surface. Individuality, however, is a funny concept in a body of work in which similitude is a magnetic force. To individuate is to break an extensive field into a collection of singularities, but these particular individuals are pulled back to a more fluid state of identity in so many ways. In their analogousness to persons, certainly, they seem to oscillate between this and that. But they are also fluctuant as objects. Permuting the relationship between frame, print, and space of display, these pictures do not settle onto the wall in a way that allows one to forget their presentness as things. (Neff often pushes her work into this territory, as is evident from the very first here – Window Seat, for example, seems not so much hung as suspended in the act of gliding past the wall.) In the leaf gathering, frames float or land in a manner that suggests both a portrait gallery in mid-hang and the pell-mell visual incident of the rainforest. One frame gives up the ghost and allows its occupant to lap waxily onto the floor. Elsewhere in the installation, a few leaves break completely free of frames and present themselves as leaf-green, leaf-shaped leaves (of paper, yes, but isn’t paper just a plant in another form anyway?). Brazenly, these leaf-leaves also have no problem using the furniture to adopt an eye-level posture, or casually taking a seat.
There is a one-to-one ratio migrating through this body of work that tests the boundaries of representation and facsimile. Like a metaphor (or, arguably, a photograph) Neff’s leaves are abstractions that conjoin with the basic structure of the real by magical identification, by the being of resemblance, by metamorphosis. She teases out this kind of slippage with lucent, minimalist humor: amid a grove of uncannily personified plants, perch two birds and a tropical flower that is uncannily like a bird. If the point of taxonomy is to order by articulating difference, then taxonomy is both invoked and exploded here. Names refract and multiply meaning while they identify, and even the material form of an object is fluid – specific and significant, but mutable rather than fixed. In the rear space of the gallery, Neff’s testing and teasing out of analogy becomes both distilled and prismatic. Forms of resemblance cascade through this portion of the installation – doubling, reflection, replacement, and all of their unruly kin are present. One way to approach the variety and complexity at play among these works is through an idea that describes photography as well as metaphor: to reprise is to place into relation, which is to transform.
In addition to a structural relationship between a photograph and that which it pictures, one could argue that all photographs stem from a relation between subject and author. Portrait photographs force the point, however: a portrait is generated in an exchange between two beings, real or imagined. Many of the works in the installation can be understood as portraits of leaves or animals, but while there is more portraiture here than in all of Neff’s prior work, there are only two pictures in which the artist levels the camera at a human subject. First Scene and Second Nature feature a young Costa Rican man who helped Neff with the roll of Mylar film she brought to Monte Azul. At some point during their collaboration, she asked the man to hold a mirror disc in front of his face, and photographed him. While playful, these portraits are also disconcerting – because they hollow out the subject, but perhaps even more so because by de-facing the subject they picture the absence of the beholder. In place of relation between subject and author is a mirror that shifts the gaze to a third space, a move which is itself redoubled when the natural reflection in First Scene is digitally replaced with another landscape in Second Nature. It is poignant that although the beholder’s gaze is deferred in depictions of a human subject, that look is met by the like-but-unlike subject of Oh Brother. The animal (and, perhaps, the forest) is to the human that which is alike but in excess. So, an ascent to metaphor spirals back to the haunting regard of a lone white horse. In this regard is the beholder met – arrested, disclosed, metamorphosed, and returned. Perhaps, although never pictured, it is this being – the beholder – who is traveling into view, estranged and remade in the pitch-dark of an animal eye, on the verge of a deep dark wood.
i Wallace Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces,” The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 81.
ii The postcard rack has been important for the artist both as motif and as an element of installation, for example in Here and There (2012), Postcloud (2012), and International Forest (1990). There are other returning elements here as well: actual pieces of furniture appear for the first time since The Mountain a Bed and a Chair (1992).
iii Eileen Neff, email communication to the author, February 18, 2015.
iv Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery Announces A Solo Exhibition By Gallery Artist Eileen Neff.
Exhibition examines materiality, experience, and authorship in technology-based art.
Glassboro, NJ – Rowan University Art Gallery presents Simulate – Permeate from January 20 to March 7, 2015 with a reception and artist’s talk on Wednesday, February 11 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Curated by Mat Tomezsko, Curator and Program Manager at InLiquid Art & Design, the exhibition features the work of eight Philadelphia-based artists and artist groups making innovative use of new media that collectively examine concepts of materiality, experience, and authorship in technology-based contemporary art.
Lyn Godley makes use of naturally occurring responses to particular light wavelengths and imagery in her photographs of water, which are altered digitally and threaded (by hand) with optic fiber and lit with LEDs to achieve an undulating effect.
Juggling Wolf, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating video and animation that is technically challenging and visually rewarding, offers two versions of a new video: one full length playing in the gallery and a shorter version broadcast across campus using the technological infrastructure of the university.
Christopher McManus’ work is a sculpture and a 20 second video that plays in reaction to the audience’s interaction with the sculpture, which is a piece meant to be a physical representation of the internet: friendly, cute, and enticing while simultaneously being completely repulsive, mean-spirited, and horrifying.
A collective of artists, engineers, and designers dedicated to bringing engaging and empowering art to the public, and to encouraging a sense of ownership to community spaces, New American Public Art has created an encounter with a monitor of a live video feed with a temporal delay. The delay is just long enough to create a disconnect, yet remain familiar as viewers are faced with images of themselves from the near past, but just beyond immediate memory.
Maria Schneider’s work begins with a pencil on paper drawing, which is then scanned and laser printed onto layers of polycarbonate and illuminated with LED light. The drawings evoke a common experience and a familiar medium, but are transformed by the technological process to become something new.
Jody Sweitzer’s outdoor sound and video installation is triggered by the movement of pedestrians on the patio after dark. The seemingly sinister messenger subverts the familiar recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and emphasizes the tendency to insert religion into what is supposed to be a secular context.
Chris Vecchio’s work is about interaction and meant to be touched, and contains more than 500 samples of audio that can be triggered by the angle of movement, ensuring that every interaction between the viewer and the sculpture is unique and questions the traditional role of the art object.
TangenT is an artist collective dedicated to mixed-media, project-based immersive art environments exploring socially relevant and politically current themes. At Rowan, their immersive installation of disparate physical, visual, and sound elements seeks to examine the simultaneous connection and disconnection of experience, perception, and knowledge using government reporting on individuals and institutions as a meditation on information control, privacy, and truth.
InLiquid Art & Design is a nonprofit organization committed to creating opportunities and exposure for visual artists while serving as a free, online public hub for arts information in the Philadelphia area. By providing the public with immediate access to view the portfolios and credentials of over 280 artists and designers via the internet; through meaningful partnerships with other cultural organizations; through community-based activities and exhibitions; and through an extensive online body of timely art information, InLiquid brings to light the richness of our region’s art activity, broadens audiences, and heightens appreciation for all forms of visual culture.
Admission to Rowan University Art Gallery, talks and reception is free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 10 am to 5 pm (with extended hours on Wednesdays to 7 pm); and Saturday, 12 to 5 pm.
Rowan University Art Gallery is located on the lower level of Westby Hall on the university campus, Route 322 in Glassboro, NJ. Directions can be found on the gallery or university websites. For more information, call 856-256-4521 or visit www.rowan.edu/artgallery.
